'Net Features : bloggers

Social Platform to "Sverve" Mom Bloggers

Amberly Dressler — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 17:05:00 GMT

Thousands of brands – from Disney to Staples – are looking for online influencers. This is the term given to people or groups who, through their reputation and content, influence their audience to make buying decisions.

Moreover, and perhaps surprisingly, many of these online influencers are moms with blogs. Nearly 4 million women fit this mold and cater to the 60 percent of moms who are online. Many of these mom bloggers, however, struggle to gain visibility and build an engaged reader base. Thus, brands struggle to find them.

That is what Sverve, a newly minted platform, promises to change. Its benefits are twofold. Sverve’s website and complementary app aim to help busy mom bloggers manage sustainable revenue-generating blogs by providing them multiple opportunities to make money. And for brands, Sverve gives them access to blogger information and leaderboards, and offer guest blogging assignments, community manager positions, or other opportunities to the top social media influencers on Sverve.

“Generating traffic through Facebook and Twitter is difficult because they are noisy platforms and are cumbersome to search,” said Rohit Vashisht, co-founder and CEO of Sverve. “Our targeted platform intelligently ranks mom bloggers, so both readers and potential brand partners can quickly find the right blog and author.”

The idea behind the platform is relatively simple, but meaningful just the same. The way it works is bloggers sign up on Sverve.com or through its iPhone app, bloggers then specify up to five areas of influence such as kids’ activities, products, special needs, etc., that fit their specific niche. They then connect their Sverve profile with their Facebook page and Twitter feed and post short summaries of their latest blog posts as tips. As a blogger’s work is shared, other readers can endorse her in the selected areas of influence, which in turn elevates her score and encourages greater readership.

“We measure the true social influence of a blogger that takes into account more than just their Facebook or Twitter activity,” said Vashisht. “As bloggers promote their work on Sverve, they gain endorsements from readers, helping them gain a higher score. This score gets them noticed by brands, allowing them to sustain their blog through the generation of real revenue.”

Know the Bloggers: Technorati State of the Blogosphere

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:51:00 GMT

Technorati will be releasing its State of the Blogosphere 2009 report in five consecutive daily segments this year. The first segment, out today, reveals who the bloggers are - the answers hopefully won’t surprise you. Reading through the report, I got the sense that while one could certainly categorize bloggers in the specific way Technorati did, there is a lot of room for variance here – hopefully there will be some more serious discussion as the rest of the report unfolds.

Hobbyists: Representing 72% of the blogosphere, hobbyists say that they blog for fun and don’t make any money from their blogging. Hobbyists say they blog to express their “personal musings” (53%). 71% update at least weekly, while 22% update daily. 76% blog to speak their minds, their main success metric is personal satisfaction (76%).

Part-Timers: The next largest group, part-timers (15%) say they “blog to supplement their income, but don’t consider it a full time job.” 75% of them blog to share their expertise, while 72% blog to attract new clients for their business. 61% say that they measure the success of their blog by the unique pageviews they attract, 60% say they also value personal satisfaction.

Self-Employeds: At 9% of respondents, self-employeds "blog full time for their own company or organization," and 10% do report blogging 40 hours per week or more. 22% say that their blog is their company, while 70% say they own a company and blog about their business. Self-employeds also value page views (63%) over personal satisfaction (53%) as a success metric, and 53% are blogging more than when they started. Finally, in a demographic (bloggers) awash with Twitter users, self-employeds are the Tweetiest of them all — 88% say they use the service.

Pros: Representing just 4% of respondents, pros say they “blog full-time for a company or organization” — though actually very few of them actually report spending a full 40 hours per week blogging. 46% are blogging more than they did when they started. 70% blog to share expertise; 53% blog to attract new clients for the business they work for. Accordingly, pageviews are the most important success metric for pros, valued by 69%, compared to 53% for personal satisfaction.

I’d like to take a second to speak to those that consider themselves pro bloggers – if you’re blogging for personal satisfaction and not pageviews or, pardon my capitalist mindset, revenue – then you’re a hobbyist. Let’s hope the rest of the report is more revealing of the state of the blogosphere.

2008 State of the Blogosphere

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:54:00 GMT

Technorati's David Sifry has announced the 2008 State of the Blogosphere. Along with data from the service's massive database of bloggers, Technorati also conducted a survey of some of their registered subscribers, asking questions about how respondents blog and more. Nearly 1300 individuals from 60 countries replied to the survey. Here are some of the most interesting highlights from the report.

- Technorati is currently tracking 133 million blogs
- 7.4 Million blogs have posted in the last 120 days - just 5.5% of all blogs tracked by Technorati.
- 1.5 Million blogs have posted at least once in the last 7 days.
- There are now, on average, 900,000 blog posts tracked every 24 hours. That means that Technorati is tracking 37,500 new blog posts per hour, or 10.4 new blog posts per second!

From the survey of Technorati bloggers:

- The majority of bloggers we surveyed currently have advertising on their blogs. Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off.
- The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month.

A Blog Widget That Pays - Finally

Administrator — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

One of the real issues I have with widgets is that they are not the most thoughtful solutions for those of us with our eye on the real prize - revenue. Many bloggers rush to test out each and every 2.0 widget that comes down the virtual highway and many weblogs and website over time become inundated with rather useless, poor performing utilities that do little more than take up space. Take a look at your own weblog - has that happened to you?

7Search.com announced by email this morning a widget that by all accounts does not fit the typical 2.0 mold. It's less about collaboration than it is giving Web workers the opportunity to generate income. The SearchAdRoll is a collection of sponsored keyword links and phrases (similar to a blogroll) that affiliates can placed anywhere (weblog, website, social network, e.g. MySpace). Each time a website visitor clicks a link, a search return list is generated in a new window. When that user selects one of the sponsored listings they get paid. Pretty simple by all accounts but a real game changer.

Selecting the right keywords will be an important part of SearchAdRoll. Fortunately 7Search has made the process pretty foolproof. For example, submit a keyword like "marketing" for your SearchAdRoll and when a user clicks the payout is $0.26-$0.50, but take 7Search's suggestion and choose internet marketing instead and you could be earning double that ($0.51-$1.00) per click on an advertisers listing. By recommending additional/alternative terms and phrases based on traffic volume and aligning those terms with the highest potential payout, affiliates can be sure they will always receive the most revenue possible.

See an example of the SearchAdRoll in the right-hand sidebar of this weblog.